Sylvia's Story
What is one thing that you want to pass on and teach those who are younger today about tolerance and about the Holocaust?
In response to your question, I have found that as time goes by people seem to become more callous about the past. "It happened a long time ago, what does it mean to me?" When that is the case, meeting someone who has a story to tell changes their attitude. Survivors are aging, and in time, they won't be there as proof of what happened.
Today as I am writing to you the world is still in a muddle. There are conflicts and wars in so many places. It seems that we have not learned anything from the past. But....... just like Anne Frank, I am optimistic about the future, and I believe that there are good people who will preserve mankind.
Your website is part of the answer.
Richman, Sylvia. Personal Interview. 31 Jul. 2014.
Sylvia Richman interviewed by Tori Lockler as part of the University of South Florida Scholar Commons
TL: So, you remember life being very happy? SR: It was a happy life, until—really, the change came when we had to leave Krakow and move to Lemberg, because then we had to leave everything and my mother said that I would complain: “When are we going home?” and “Everything is dirty,” and “It’s not the same,” and “When are we going home to our clean house?”
SR: That’s what I remember when we had to move, and also—(clears throat) excuse me. Then, there was an issue of a magazine that came, a newspaper that came in Lemberg. I remember seeing the picture of Hitler on the cover of it; it was a color picture. And I remember seeing it, and I took a pencil and I poked holes in it, because I knew that this was bad stuff. But I was just a child, and I must have heard people talk that this was bad news.
Soon after that, the Germans came into Lemberg as well. And I remember my parents having to give up things, like my mother had to give up her wedding band. They had to give up radios; they had to give things up for the war effort because the Germans asked for it. And so, things were changing. The whole atmosphere was different. In the beginning, everybody came together. The whole family came from all over, and we were sort of trying to be a unit, so that we would face whatever was to come together. We realized that things were bad, but not really how bad they were going to become. But I was small, and I just saw how the adults reacted to it.
TL: Can you tell us about the move into the ghetto?
SR: Well, the move into the ghetto was—it didn’t seem to be a very big deal at that time. It was moving into another neighborhood and moving in with other people. It was like slowly [moving] from Krakow to an apartment living with my uncle, and then we had to move into another place and it was more crowded. But as a child, I only saw that we were crowded, we were living with a lot of people, and my father wasn’t there every day. My father was being sent to a place that he was helping build a camp; it was a labor camp, eventually. But he would go during the day from the ghetto and then he would come back to the ghetto. And then one day, he did not come back. He stayed, and my mother told me that he was interned in a camp called Janowska. That was right outside of Lemberg. So, that’s where he was while we were in the ghetto.
TL: How old were you at this time?
SR: (clears throat) I must have been about four and a half or so.
TL: Do you have any other memories from the ghetto?
SR: As they were taking people away from the ghetto, they had—they tried to make the ghetto smaller. They would move the walls, because this way they did not have to be in charge of such a large area. But one of the boards was loose. And my mother packed a couple of items of clothing, put them in a bag—it was a paper bag—and she took it to the place, and we went out of the board in the middle of the night, and [she was] also holding my hand. We squeezed out between the boards, and we were outside, and we saw in the distance the guards smoking their cigarettes. That hand was squeezed again, and we were out.
The woman, the social worker, took me to a children's home, an orphanage that was run by the Catholic nuns. I was one of many children—the orphans—there, but I was a different child. I was a Jewish child who had to keep a secret. There was another little girl, who was also a little younger than I. She was about three or so. And she somehow or another—I don’t know, she came up to me and said she was Jewish, and I told her, “Do not talk about that. Be quiet. It’s not your place to talk.” Didn’t tell her that I was, but I told her to be quiet.
But we were not there very long. We were there for about two, three weeks before another problem arose. And that was—that little girl and I were taken by a couple of nuns and were put on a train to the mountains. It seemed that there was a rumor going around that they were going to have an investigation at the convent, and that the Germans were going to raid it. And that’s why—I heard things were going on. I didn’t understand what, but when they took the two of us, I realized it was because of us.
Anyway, the nun and I traveled, and I ended up in a convent—not in Warsaw, but right near Warsaw. It was in the country. It was also a children’s home. It was also an orphanage for girls, and the same kind of nuns were running it. But there, I became part of the community. I went to school. I attended catechism classes with the children. The only person that knew that I was Jewish was the mother superior, and that was a concern of hers. And so while I was studying for my catechism classes, eventually my First Communion was coming up, and they wanted to make sure that it was done in the proper order. So, I was taken in the morning prior to my First Communion and I was baptized in the church on the property. Very early in the morning before the rest the children were up, I was whisked off, and one of my teachers became my godmother and one of the priests became my godfather. So, I became legal for the First Communion.
The convent had problems as far as bombing. There was a lot of shooting in the neighborhood, because there were bursts of artillery. And at the end of the war, I found out that we were right next to the front between the Russians and the Germans. So, things were going on. We had bombs hitting one of the buildings; that turned out to be a leaflet bomb, but it still hit part of the buildings. And we were—it wasn’t always safe. One day, the children were talking about seeing fires from a distance and saying, “Oh, something’s happening to the Jews in Warsaw.” It could have been the time of the uprising in Warsaw.
So we were close; things were happening. We were still feeling the war. The Germans would come in and out of the convent, because there was armies around us.
But one day, I was called into the mother superior’s office. And I did not know—I said, “What did I do?” You don’t get called to the mother superior’s office unless you’ve done something. I checked my brain. I said, “What did I do? I’ve been to the confession. I had nothing. I didn’t do anything bad this week. What did I do?” I walked in and I had my head down, and there—I lifted up my eyes to see the mother superior. With her was another lady, and I knew her. This was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister! Aunt Beba, we called her. Her name was Barbara, but I called her Beba, my Aunt Beba. And oh, what a time we had, crying and laughing! She had lived with us, prior to us being in—when we were in the ghetto. That was the last time I had seen her. But I remembered her. It was two and half years, but I still remembered this was my aunt!
We sat and waited for the train, and she told me a story. She said that she had been taken off the streets. She also had false papers, and she had been taken off the streets of her town, of Lemberg. She was taken to Germany. And my other aunt, my Aunt Sidja—her other sister—was also taken to Germany, also with false papers. And then my mother had been taken to Austria, and she showed me a picture of my mom. I went and ran to my classmates to show my mother’s picture, because I had to pick some stuff up from the room, to get my things I needed to take with me, and I showed them the picture. And now that I think about it, these poor orphans! I’m showing off my mother—I didn’t know if she was alive or not, but I had a picture of my mother.
One night—it was really morning. Around four o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on the door. And it was scary, because we were—just a few months before that we were under German occupation, and we did not know who was coming. We thought maybe the war had come back the other way. You never knew what was going to happen. And so, somebody knocking at four o’clock in the morning is very scary. And I didn’t know what made me do it, but I stood up on that little bench, and in my sleep I must have heard a voice or whether it was something, and I yelled, “Tata! Tata!” That’s Polish for “Daddy.” And sure enough, it was my dad! We opened up the door, and there was my dad!
TL: Okay, thank you. And then, you had also left off with your father coming to your aunt’s house.
SR: Yes. Well, when my father came, we made plans. And he and my aunt—it was very tough, because we did not know where my mother was. That was one piece that was missing out of the pieces. We did not know where some of the other family members were, but for us, finding my mother was the most important thing. And my father had written letters throughout his time in Romania. He was writing letters, thinking that she was in certain places, but nothing came back. And when he was speaking to my aunt, they made a plan that I would go with him and that he would try to find my mother, and she would also try to find my mother, because she had the other sister, and they were going to keep in touch. And that was the last that they were going to do.
We did pass on the road a prisoner of war camp with German soldiers wanting—reaching out their hands for cigarettes. And as a child, what did I know of how to deal with them? I knew they were bad, and I didn’t know any other way to say it, but I stuck out my tongue at them as we passed by, and that was my revenge. (laughs) Childish one, but—and when my father said that’s who they were, I was so angry.
And one day, my father came on a Friday, and he had amazing news. One of the letters that he had been sending out arrived at my mother’s destination. My mother had been sick during the war, when she was in Austria. She had typhus and she had been in the hospital, and she did not venture out of—her health was not that good that she would venture after the war, and she was liberated by the American army rather than the Russians. My father had been liberated by the Russians, and so was I. But she was liberated by the Americans.
She had been taken off the streets of Poland, from Lemberg, for slave labor in Austria, and she was working in a place called Linz. She worked in a castle where the Germans occupied. She was a cleaning woman, and eventually worked herself up to be the head of the cleaning department. She spoke German and she spoke French and she spoke Polish beautifully, so she was an asset to them, but she was a putzfrau. She cleaned. And when she was liberated by Americans, she worked locally with a family that had a restaurant, and she worked in the restaurant, cooking and serving. It was a small family. And then she eventually ended up in a displaced persons camp.
It turns out my mother had another brother. The second oldest brother had made it during the war. He had gone from Poland to France, from France to Haiti, and from Haiti, he ended up in the United States in the early forties [1940s]. Somehow or other, they found him—they found each other. The communication must have been during the forties [1940s]; they still maybe kept it, because they contacted each other, wrote letters. And she wanted to go to be with her brother.
But we got there, and she wasn’t there for that because she didn’t know exactly where we were coming. We were going all over the—this was like a hotel—and we are looking all over for her, and then she came in, and it was amazing. I mean, we were all crying, and we were all—and she had saved things for me. She had saved socks. She had little toys and she had a little doll for me, because she had imagined what age I might be and what I might want. During the whole time, every time she looked at a child, she would say, “Oh, my daughter might be about this size, this age.”
We had also moved from one displaced persons camp to another. We were in more than one camp prior to coming into the States. It was a long road to get to the States. It took us months before we got permission, and we were—finally, we went on a ship. We went on —it was S.S. Marine Tiger. It was a Marine boat, and it was a transport ship in those days, for soldiers. And we were twelve days, crossing from Bremen [Germany] to New York. And in New York, we stayed at a hotel—it was called Hotel Marseilles—and there we were until we found an apartment in the Lower East Side. And at one of my—also, networking found some relatives, and this relative took me to school to introduce me to the education in this country.
I do speak to the children about my story, about what happened, and I have a happy ending. My mother and father and I, we did very well. We had a tough time starting, but my father died of a stroke at the age of seventy-nine. My mother lived till ninety-nine and a half, and I had the pleasure of taking care of her during her last years. She lived here in Tampa for about seven years. We survived, and we had a good story to tell.
TL: Okay. Thank you. And finally, is there any final experience that you would like to share, or any advice you would like to give to young people now?
SR: Well, I think the world needs to learn how to be kind and find that religion has a place in their lives, but not to make religion the overall; and that you do not have to be on the same path to God as somebody else; and that you should respect each individual for what he is, not because he has a certain faith or because he lives in a different place. And the world has not learned how to do that yet. And we have too much problem because we think, “My religion is better than your religion,” and that is the biggest problem.
And economics—I think if we can keep everybody safe and fed and happy, problems do not arise. As soon as you have some kind of economic problem, that’s when hatred comes out and people start picking on [others] and scapegoating. I’m just hoping that I live to see that this gets better.
SR: I hope that—my story is a gentle story. There was tough times. There was a lot of suffering, but I was fortunate that I had good people around me. And as I always say, I say thank you to that policeman who was able to that day make that decision to save my mother and myself, because had he not made that choice that day, I wouldn’t be here. So, that’s what I have to say.
The rest of this interview can be found at http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&context=hgstud_oh.
Richman, Sylvia. Interview with Tori Lockler. Scholar Commons, University of South Florida, 6 Nov. 2009. Web. 18 Jul. 2014.
In response to your question, I have found that as time goes by people seem to become more callous about the past. "It happened a long time ago, what does it mean to me?" When that is the case, meeting someone who has a story to tell changes their attitude. Survivors are aging, and in time, they won't be there as proof of what happened.
Today as I am writing to you the world is still in a muddle. There are conflicts and wars in so many places. It seems that we have not learned anything from the past. But....... just like Anne Frank, I am optimistic about the future, and I believe that there are good people who will preserve mankind.
Your website is part of the answer.
Richman, Sylvia. Personal Interview. 31 Jul. 2014.
Sylvia Richman interviewed by Tori Lockler as part of the University of South Florida Scholar Commons
TL: So, you remember life being very happy? SR: It was a happy life, until—really, the change came when we had to leave Krakow and move to Lemberg, because then we had to leave everything and my mother said that I would complain: “When are we going home?” and “Everything is dirty,” and “It’s not the same,” and “When are we going home to our clean house?”
SR: That’s what I remember when we had to move, and also—(clears throat) excuse me. Then, there was an issue of a magazine that came, a newspaper that came in Lemberg. I remember seeing the picture of Hitler on the cover of it; it was a color picture. And I remember seeing it, and I took a pencil and I poked holes in it, because I knew that this was bad stuff. But I was just a child, and I must have heard people talk that this was bad news.
Soon after that, the Germans came into Lemberg as well. And I remember my parents having to give up things, like my mother had to give up her wedding band. They had to give up radios; they had to give things up for the war effort because the Germans asked for it. And so, things were changing. The whole atmosphere was different. In the beginning, everybody came together. The whole family came from all over, and we were sort of trying to be a unit, so that we would face whatever was to come together. We realized that things were bad, but not really how bad they were going to become. But I was small, and I just saw how the adults reacted to it.
TL: Can you tell us about the move into the ghetto?
SR: Well, the move into the ghetto was—it didn’t seem to be a very big deal at that time. It was moving into another neighborhood and moving in with other people. It was like slowly [moving] from Krakow to an apartment living with my uncle, and then we had to move into another place and it was more crowded. But as a child, I only saw that we were crowded, we were living with a lot of people, and my father wasn’t there every day. My father was being sent to a place that he was helping build a camp; it was a labor camp, eventually. But he would go during the day from the ghetto and then he would come back to the ghetto. And then one day, he did not come back. He stayed, and my mother told me that he was interned in a camp called Janowska. That was right outside of Lemberg. So, that’s where he was while we were in the ghetto.
TL: How old were you at this time?
SR: (clears throat) I must have been about four and a half or so.
TL: Do you have any other memories from the ghetto?
SR: As they were taking people away from the ghetto, they had—they tried to make the ghetto smaller. They would move the walls, because this way they did not have to be in charge of such a large area. But one of the boards was loose. And my mother packed a couple of items of clothing, put them in a bag—it was a paper bag—and she took it to the place, and we went out of the board in the middle of the night, and [she was] also holding my hand. We squeezed out between the boards, and we were outside, and we saw in the distance the guards smoking their cigarettes. That hand was squeezed again, and we were out.
The woman, the social worker, took me to a children's home, an orphanage that was run by the Catholic nuns. I was one of many children—the orphans—there, but I was a different child. I was a Jewish child who had to keep a secret. There was another little girl, who was also a little younger than I. She was about three or so. And she somehow or another—I don’t know, she came up to me and said she was Jewish, and I told her, “Do not talk about that. Be quiet. It’s not your place to talk.” Didn’t tell her that I was, but I told her to be quiet.
But we were not there very long. We were there for about two, three weeks before another problem arose. And that was—that little girl and I were taken by a couple of nuns and were put on a train to the mountains. It seemed that there was a rumor going around that they were going to have an investigation at the convent, and that the Germans were going to raid it. And that’s why—I heard things were going on. I didn’t understand what, but when they took the two of us, I realized it was because of us.
Anyway, the nun and I traveled, and I ended up in a convent—not in Warsaw, but right near Warsaw. It was in the country. It was also a children’s home. It was also an orphanage for girls, and the same kind of nuns were running it. But there, I became part of the community. I went to school. I attended catechism classes with the children. The only person that knew that I was Jewish was the mother superior, and that was a concern of hers. And so while I was studying for my catechism classes, eventually my First Communion was coming up, and they wanted to make sure that it was done in the proper order. So, I was taken in the morning prior to my First Communion and I was baptized in the church on the property. Very early in the morning before the rest the children were up, I was whisked off, and one of my teachers became my godmother and one of the priests became my godfather. So, I became legal for the First Communion.
The convent had problems as far as bombing. There was a lot of shooting in the neighborhood, because there were bursts of artillery. And at the end of the war, I found out that we were right next to the front between the Russians and the Germans. So, things were going on. We had bombs hitting one of the buildings; that turned out to be a leaflet bomb, but it still hit part of the buildings. And we were—it wasn’t always safe. One day, the children were talking about seeing fires from a distance and saying, “Oh, something’s happening to the Jews in Warsaw.” It could have been the time of the uprising in Warsaw.
So we were close; things were happening. We were still feeling the war. The Germans would come in and out of the convent, because there was armies around us.
But one day, I was called into the mother superior’s office. And I did not know—I said, “What did I do?” You don’t get called to the mother superior’s office unless you’ve done something. I checked my brain. I said, “What did I do? I’ve been to the confession. I had nothing. I didn’t do anything bad this week. What did I do?” I walked in and I had my head down, and there—I lifted up my eyes to see the mother superior. With her was another lady, and I knew her. This was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister! Aunt Beba, we called her. Her name was Barbara, but I called her Beba, my Aunt Beba. And oh, what a time we had, crying and laughing! She had lived with us, prior to us being in—when we were in the ghetto. That was the last time I had seen her. But I remembered her. It was two and half years, but I still remembered this was my aunt!
We sat and waited for the train, and she told me a story. She said that she had been taken off the streets. She also had false papers, and she had been taken off the streets of her town, of Lemberg. She was taken to Germany. And my other aunt, my Aunt Sidja—her other sister—was also taken to Germany, also with false papers. And then my mother had been taken to Austria, and she showed me a picture of my mom. I went and ran to my classmates to show my mother’s picture, because I had to pick some stuff up from the room, to get my things I needed to take with me, and I showed them the picture. And now that I think about it, these poor orphans! I’m showing off my mother—I didn’t know if she was alive or not, but I had a picture of my mother.
One night—it was really morning. Around four o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on the door. And it was scary, because we were—just a few months before that we were under German occupation, and we did not know who was coming. We thought maybe the war had come back the other way. You never knew what was going to happen. And so, somebody knocking at four o’clock in the morning is very scary. And I didn’t know what made me do it, but I stood up on that little bench, and in my sleep I must have heard a voice or whether it was something, and I yelled, “Tata! Tata!” That’s Polish for “Daddy.” And sure enough, it was my dad! We opened up the door, and there was my dad!
TL: Okay, thank you. And then, you had also left off with your father coming to your aunt’s house.
SR: Yes. Well, when my father came, we made plans. And he and my aunt—it was very tough, because we did not know where my mother was. That was one piece that was missing out of the pieces. We did not know where some of the other family members were, but for us, finding my mother was the most important thing. And my father had written letters throughout his time in Romania. He was writing letters, thinking that she was in certain places, but nothing came back. And when he was speaking to my aunt, they made a plan that I would go with him and that he would try to find my mother, and she would also try to find my mother, because she had the other sister, and they were going to keep in touch. And that was the last that they were going to do.
We did pass on the road a prisoner of war camp with German soldiers wanting—reaching out their hands for cigarettes. And as a child, what did I know of how to deal with them? I knew they were bad, and I didn’t know any other way to say it, but I stuck out my tongue at them as we passed by, and that was my revenge. (laughs) Childish one, but—and when my father said that’s who they were, I was so angry.
And one day, my father came on a Friday, and he had amazing news. One of the letters that he had been sending out arrived at my mother’s destination. My mother had been sick during the war, when she was in Austria. She had typhus and she had been in the hospital, and she did not venture out of—her health was not that good that she would venture after the war, and she was liberated by the American army rather than the Russians. My father had been liberated by the Russians, and so was I. But she was liberated by the Americans.
She had been taken off the streets of Poland, from Lemberg, for slave labor in Austria, and she was working in a place called Linz. She worked in a castle where the Germans occupied. She was a cleaning woman, and eventually worked herself up to be the head of the cleaning department. She spoke German and she spoke French and she spoke Polish beautifully, so she was an asset to them, but she was a putzfrau. She cleaned. And when she was liberated by Americans, she worked locally with a family that had a restaurant, and she worked in the restaurant, cooking and serving. It was a small family. And then she eventually ended up in a displaced persons camp.
It turns out my mother had another brother. The second oldest brother had made it during the war. He had gone from Poland to France, from France to Haiti, and from Haiti, he ended up in the United States in the early forties [1940s]. Somehow or other, they found him—they found each other. The communication must have been during the forties [1940s]; they still maybe kept it, because they contacted each other, wrote letters. And she wanted to go to be with her brother.
But we got there, and she wasn’t there for that because she didn’t know exactly where we were coming. We were going all over the—this was like a hotel—and we are looking all over for her, and then she came in, and it was amazing. I mean, we were all crying, and we were all—and she had saved things for me. She had saved socks. She had little toys and she had a little doll for me, because she had imagined what age I might be and what I might want. During the whole time, every time she looked at a child, she would say, “Oh, my daughter might be about this size, this age.”
We had also moved from one displaced persons camp to another. We were in more than one camp prior to coming into the States. It was a long road to get to the States. It took us months before we got permission, and we were—finally, we went on a ship. We went on —it was S.S. Marine Tiger. It was a Marine boat, and it was a transport ship in those days, for soldiers. And we were twelve days, crossing from Bremen [Germany] to New York. And in New York, we stayed at a hotel—it was called Hotel Marseilles—and there we were until we found an apartment in the Lower East Side. And at one of my—also, networking found some relatives, and this relative took me to school to introduce me to the education in this country.
I do speak to the children about my story, about what happened, and I have a happy ending. My mother and father and I, we did very well. We had a tough time starting, but my father died of a stroke at the age of seventy-nine. My mother lived till ninety-nine and a half, and I had the pleasure of taking care of her during her last years. She lived here in Tampa for about seven years. We survived, and we had a good story to tell.
TL: Okay. Thank you. And finally, is there any final experience that you would like to share, or any advice you would like to give to young people now?
SR: Well, I think the world needs to learn how to be kind and find that religion has a place in their lives, but not to make religion the overall; and that you do not have to be on the same path to God as somebody else; and that you should respect each individual for what he is, not because he has a certain faith or because he lives in a different place. And the world has not learned how to do that yet. And we have too much problem because we think, “My religion is better than your religion,” and that is the biggest problem.
And economics—I think if we can keep everybody safe and fed and happy, problems do not arise. As soon as you have some kind of economic problem, that’s when hatred comes out and people start picking on [others] and scapegoating. I’m just hoping that I live to see that this gets better.
SR: I hope that—my story is a gentle story. There was tough times. There was a lot of suffering, but I was fortunate that I had good people around me. And as I always say, I say thank you to that policeman who was able to that day make that decision to save my mother and myself, because had he not made that choice that day, I wouldn’t be here. So, that’s what I have to say.
The rest of this interview can be found at http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&context=hgstud_oh.
Richman, Sylvia. Interview with Tori Lockler. Scholar Commons, University of South Florida, 6 Nov. 2009. Web. 18 Jul. 2014.